Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 04_ Backlash - Aaron Allston [5]
Then there was more life, big life, close ahead, with malicious intent—
From a thick nest of magenta-flowered underbrush twice the height of a human male, just to the right of Luke’s path ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was human-like, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke’s speeder bike as he passed.
Disaster takes only a fraction of a second to bring about. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of competition; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.
He came free of the speeder bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature’s blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction burn.
He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely sturdy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing into a mass of tendrils ending in big-petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.
Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn’t want to speculate about.
Finally, he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momentarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy, but not far behind him it illuminated a swirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he’d just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben’s speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.
Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.
A moment later, the owner of that huge arm loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, standing upright but bent forward.
The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a rust-streaked cup of metal large enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped to its left forearm was a thick, round durasteel shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared with the creature’s enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.
The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened, and it offered a challenging growl.
Luke glared at it. “Do you really want to take me on right now? I don’t recommend it.”
It reached for him.
The rancor’s extraordinary musculature gave it speed not usually found in creatures so large. Luke kicked downward, propelling himself into a backward somersault, and rose to his feet as the rancor’s fingers plowed into the soft, mossy ground where he had just been lying. He put an edge of anger and fearsomeness into both his voice and the Force. “It’s time for you to leave before you get hurt. Badly hurt.”
But the rancor merely bellowed at him again, apparently unfazed by the Jedi mental touch. It did not bother trying to grab Luke a second time; with